Paul feyerabend against method

History and Philosophy of Science. Feyerabend reports that he and his fellow science students looked forward to exposing him as a fraud, but in fact were treated, at the Alpbach seminar, to a battle between Ehrenhaft and the orthodox in which the former presented his experiments but the latter defended their position by using strategies which Galileo's opponents would have been proud of, ridiculing Ehrenhaft's phenomena as mere Dreckeffects. Oberheim, Frankfurt am Main:

To avoid being ad hoc it would have to create his own supporting theories in related fields the moment it comes up and it's obvious that not all scientific fields have the same maturity at all times. And those who do not like to see the state meddling in scientific matters should remember the sizeable chauvinism of science: Cambridge University Press, To show the surprising similarities of myth and science, Methpd shall briefly discuss an interesting paper by Robin Horton, entitled 'African Traditional Thought and Western Science'.

The reasons are produced, but they are often disregarded or laughed out of court, and unhappiness is the fate of the bold inventors.

Science must be protected from ideologies; and societies, especially democratic societies, must be protected from science. Where I happen to disagree is wh I read Feyerabend because I know he's a critical figure in the philosophy of science, not because I expected to agree with anything he said. As we shall see, Feyerabend's youthful positivist scientism makes quite a contrast with his later conclusions.

What's so great about truth? It is impossible because of the structure of the world in which we live and because of feyerabens laws that are valid in this world. Unlike positivism, which conflicts with science by taking experiences as unanalysable building-blocks, realism treats experiences as analysable, explaining them as the result of processes not immediately accessible to observation. In addition to natural interpretations, Galileo also changes sensations that seem to endanger Copernicus.

This meeting seems to have been the first airing of the important concept of incommensurability feyerxbend not the term itself, which crept into publications only a decade later:. Most of the book is one extended case study of how Galileo's heliocentric model of the solar system replaced the idea of the earth at the center. Lacking Lakatos's counter-arguments as balance, Feyerabend here reads as pual provocative and idealistic than he may otherwise intend, and I believe this is important to realize before tackling his case.

Paul Feyerabend's Against Method

At the end of the war, Feyerabend went to the mayor of Apolda and asked for a job. Still, the events of the war did not register. Argument occurs and zgainst the results are passed on. What remains to be explained is why the stone stays with the tower and is not left behind. This case shows, incidentally, that like the older philosophies of science the new microsociology is not a universal account but a description of prominent msthod of a special period.

It is not the interference of agains state that is objectionable in the Lysenko case, but the totalitarian interference that kills the opponent instead of letting him go his own way. However, Feyerabend sometimes also recognised that this is to present science as too much of a monolith.

Paul Feyerabend

Contemporary philosophies of the latter type are said to rest on the notions of Objectivity and Reason. Using that phenomenon as a start, I think how I can prove or disprove it - find one way to prove it - and write the paper.

For those hoping that Feyerabend might use the occasion of his autobiography to settle accounts with his erstwhile philosophical conscience, it is disappointing that the book tells us so little about his acquaintance with Popper.

The way his philosophy in general and this book in particular have been set up can be interpreted in different ways. The diehards of the status quo feel an obligation to study one paper or another, to make a few grumbling comments, and perhaps to join in its exploration.

Scientists do not solve problems because they possess a magic wand - methodology, or a theory of rationality - but because they have studied a problem for a long time, because they know the situation fairly well, because they are not too dumb though that is rather doubtful nowadays when almost anyone can become a scientistand because the excesses of one scientific school are almost always balanced by the excesses of some other school.

And the initial playful activity is an essential prerequisite of the final act of understanding.

Against Method | The Anarchist Library

Essays in Contemporary Science and PhilosophyR. According to our present results, hardly any theory is consistent with the facts.

In two papers published inhe sought to defend materialism roughly, the view that everything which exists is physical against the supposition that the mind cannot be a physical thing. New views thus strike out in new directions and frown upon the older problems. The German translation by Hermann Vetter was abridged and reworked by Feyerabend, whose native language was German. From that point on, mastery begins when we start to release ourselves from technique in order to be more appropriate to whatever situation we find ourselves in, simply because technique is a pedagogical tool, and its rigid organization will make certain acts impossible because they are incommensurable with that technique.

Sometimes, a question simply isn't available from a given point of view because its context is not available. It thereby makes the as yet untested part of that theory a measure of validity.